IPCC sends draft Synthesis Report to governments for comment

27 August 2014

Authors of the Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change (IPCC) have finished drafting the Synthesis Report of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and sent the draft to governments for comments on the text.

The Synthesis Report is the final product of the Fifth Assessment cycle. It will integrate key messages from the three recent working group reports: the physical science basis (September 2013); impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (March 2014); and mitigation of climate change (April 2014).

The review period runs from 25 August to 10 October 2014. The comments received from governments will prepare the way for the meeting in Copenhagen on 27-31 October at which the IPCC will finalize the Synthesis Report. At that meeting the IPCC’s member governments will examine the report’s Summary for Policymakers line-by-line and the longer report section-by-section in a dialogue with the authors that have written the report. The report will be released at a press conference on 2 November.

The IPCC received around 6,000 comments in the review of the first draft of the Synthesis Report held between 21 April and 13 June 2014. Besides government, experts from the scientific community were invited to take part in that review. According to the IPCC’s procedures, the authors of a report must respond to every comment received in the review process. To ensure transparency, all the comments and the responses from the authors will be published together with the drafts after the report is published.